Free Mend the Living by Maylis de Kerangal Page A

and maybe then she would even get up and spin around, maybe she would even dance. But Simon – no. For Simon, it’s irreversible.
    Sean’s face – these tapered eyes beneath heavy lids – lights up on the screen of her phone. Marianne, you called me. Immediately she dissolves into tears – chemistry of grief – incapable of articulating a single word while he says again: Marianne? Marianne? He must have thought that the echo of the sea cramped inside the inner harbour was interfering, he must have confused the drool, snot, and tears with static on the radio waves while she bit the back of her hand, paralyzed by the horror that suddenly rose in her at the sound of this voice, so dear, familiar as only a voice can be – but suddenly estranged, abominably estranged, because it arose from a space-time where Simon’s accident never happened, a world intact, situated light years from this empty café; and it was dissonant now, this voice, it disorchestrated the world, it tore at her brain: it was the voice of life before. Marianne hears this man calling her and she weeps, swept through with the emotion we sometimes feel when faced with that which has survived unscathed, in time – it unleashes the pain of the impossibility of going back. One day she will have to learn in which direction time flows, if it’s linear or if it traces the rapid circles of a hula hoop, if it forms rings, rolls in upon itself like the whorls of a shell, if it can take the form of the tube that bends the wave, sucks up the sea and the entire universe in its dark backhand, yes, she will have to understand what it’s made of, the time that passes. Marianne grips her phone in her hand: scared to speak, scared to destroy Sean’s voice, scared that she will never again be allowed to hear it as it is, that she will never again be allowed to experience this disappeared time where Simon was not in an irreversible situation, knowing full well that she has to put an end to the anachronism of this voice and reimplant it here, in the tragic present, she knows she has to do it, and when she finally manages to express herself, she is neither concrete nor precise, she’s incoherent, so much so that he begins to lose his calm, he too seized by terror – something has happened, something bad – and Sean starts questioning her, infuriated, is it Simon? what about Simon? what about surfing? an accident where? Within the texture of sound his face appears, precise as in the photo onscreen. She imagines he might deduce a drowning, corrects herself, the monosyllables becoming sentences that slowly organize and form meaning, and soon she drops into order everything she knows, closing her eyes and placing the phone flat against her sternum at the sound of Sean’s scream. Then gathering herself again, she quickly specifies that yes, the condition is life threatening, that he’s in a coma but is still alive, and Sean, disfigured in his turn, disfigured as she is, answers I’m coming, I’ll be there in two minutes, where are you? – and his voice has changed camps now, it has joined Marianne, it has pierced the fragile membrane that separates those who are happy from those who are damned: wait for me.
    Marianne finds the strength to tell him the name of the café, the umpteenth Balto in the port city, she tells him where it is – it was pouring rain the first time she came here, that was in October, four months ago, she was working on an article commissioned by the heritage foundation, had wanted to see the Church of Saint Joseph again, Oscar Niemeyer’s Le Volcan , the model apartment of a Perret building, all this concrete whose movement and radical form she liked, but her notebook had got drenched and once she was at the bar, streaming, she had downed a whisky, straight: Sean had started sleeping at the hangar, he had left the apartment, taking nothing with him.
    She makes out her form in the mirror at the back, then her face, the one he will see